E-Fears, E-Risks and Citizen-Intelligence: Surveillance Impacts on Research and Confidentiality
This research note links the covert and overt chilling effects of cyber-surveillance on activist campaigns and on the social research of social movement actors in campaigns of resistance. Based on fieldwork in Aotearoa New Zealand during campaigns of resistance against offshore and onshore oil and gas proposals, this note explores how surveillance fears impact the public gatherings and information-sharing of citizen-activists and how the researcher may fail to ensure participant confidence and confidentiality, thereby becoming the researched and documented as well. The actions and commitments of both parties, the citizen-activist and the researcher of grassroots and social movements, may be strengthened or impeded by the degree of expected, though rarely verified, political and economic surveillance.